Precursor VenturesA classic pre-seed and seed stage venture capital firm

Do VCs Even Need IPOs Anymore? #ai #ventre #startup #ipo

27 Feb 2025 · 1 min

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Precursor Ventures (video) discusses changes in venture-capital liquidity, arguing that large private-market M&A and secondary opportunities (e.g., Google's near-acquisition of Wiz) can provide multi-billion-dollar exits that historically required IPOs. The speaker cites specific figures for entry and exit valuations and suggests private transactions are effectively replacing IPO liquidity for VCs.

Questions this video answers

Google.

"120 ish million post" (spoken approximate).

$23 billion.

$10 billion, $15 billion, $20 billion (spoken examples).

Chapters

There are a couple things that happened last year that really got my attention. One of the big ones was like when Google almost bought Wiz because that's the company that you would have had to pay 120 ish million post to get into, but you would have gotten out at 23 billion in an M&A transaction, not an IPO. And as far as I understand there were opportunities to take secondaries along the way. Part of the reason that you needed IPOs was that was the only way you could get billion dollar liquidity events to the tunes of billions of dollars. But if now in the private markets you can get out of these companies at 10, 15, 20 billion dol billion dollars, it's effectively replaced the liquidity that you could only get from IPOs.